CalligoTech raises $1.1 million in pre-series A round

Indian semiconductor startup Calligo Technologies has raised USD 1.1 million in a pre-series A round led by Seafund and Artha Venture Fund. CalligoTech’s products focus on Accelerating High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI workloads with its innovative implementation of POSIT in silicon.

The funds raised will be used for R&D expenses for developing the ver2.0 Silicon chip and platform. In addition to the previous breakthrough with the POSIT-based ver1.0 silicon semiconductor chip, the company is also planning to further increase its engineering talent and tech capabilities to build va er2.0 Semiconductor products and establish partnerships with System-Integrators and OEMs/ODMs, according to a media release.

“Compute requirement is growing exponentially across the globe. CalligoTech chips and platform improves performance and reduces data power consumption with their innovative approach,” Narendra Bhandari, General Partner, Seafund, said. “They have completed the full chip cycle from design to products in v1.0 and are accelerating to tape out the nextgen silicon.”

The Bengaluru-based company aims to solve the performance bottlenecks of computing needed for large-scale modeling and simulations in HPC systems and large-model training and inference needed in AI systems, a critical need in a market with large computational needs. In the last 12 months, CalligoTech has collaborated with US universities, national laboratories, and supercomputing centers to improve access to tech talent and soft launch its operations in the US, the media release said.

“Insatiable demand for computing for HPC/AI has thus far been addressed by adding more and more hardware, without addressing computing efficiency at grass-root levels,” Anantha Kinnal, Co-founder and CEO of CalligoTech, said. “POSIT is a game-changing invention for real-number representation, as it tackles this issue by enabling the use of fewer computing bits for the same or improved mathematical accuracy, higher energy efficiency, and an increase in dynamic range.”

“With AI and HPC workloads growing exponentially, computing efficiency is more critical than ever. Calligo’s POSIT-based chips solve fundamental performance bottlenecks, enabling faster, more precise, and power-efficient computing at scale,” Anirudh A Damani, Managing Partner of Artha Venture Fund, said. “As demand for large-scale modeling and AI training surges, we see POSIT as a game-changing innovation poised to become a new standard in computing.”